Corey Vilhauer, Writerhttp://www.coreyvilhauer.com
Fri, 11 Jan 2019 20:26:31 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.3http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/cropped-favicon-32x32.pngCorey Vilhauer, Writerhttp://www.coreyvilhauer.com
3232So, What Were The 90s Like, Dad?http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2019/01/11/so-what-were-the-90s-like-dad/
http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2019/01/11/so-what-were-the-90s-like-dad/#respondFri, 11 Jan 2019 20:26:31 +0000http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/?p=2673Music rarely comes without preconceptions. Even if it’s new, we know the context. We know the channel, the genre, the album cover. We attend the show and see the flyer and know one of the bands and so there’s little to be surprised by.

And yet, here I was, listening to Discover Weekly and catching a song I’d heard before, wondering at how good it was. Turning my eye a little, feeling all of that context crash into place.

Taylor Swift. Huh.

Listen, I like Taylor Swift an okay amount. Some stuff is great. Some is … not. This song – “Don’t Blame Me” – is from her new album, which I’ve completely written off. Completely left for dead.

This is relevant because this is what Sierra does all the time. As a middle-school-kid learning about opinions and taste, she’s quick to decide when something’s amazing or horrible — never anything in between — because that’s how kids do it. The discovery of taste is a rush; the idea that you can create your own likes and dislikes lists leaves a kid drunk with self-definition.

It’s with this I’ve been able to start being a bit more open about my tastes. I have a strict rule (that I sometimes struggle to follow) that I’m not going to talk shit about music or movies or books because taste is relative — there’s nothing less endearing than hearing how much someone doesn’t like something. But now instead of blind compliance, I have shifted into a new prefix:

“You know, I don’t care for it, but…”

This happens a lot in the car, where Sierra’s most likely to ask about music. Both kids insist on listening to 101.9 KELO-FM, the modern day equivalent to what we used know as 92.5 KELO-FM, which is what I always knew as adult contemporary and Kerrie knows as “the channel my mother listened to when she cleaned the house.” One part Michael McDonald, one part Whitney Houston, one part Lionel Richie. Now it seems to be all parts Maroon 5.

They love this channel. I hate this channel. So we’ve come to an agreement: if I get into the car before they do, I choose the music. Some mornings it’s NPR, and the kids hate that — not because the news is boring, but because the news is awful — and so we still end up back on 101.9.

Today, I got into the car first and we listened to Revelation Records-era post-punk. Some days they win. Some days I do.

After picking her up from practice, Sierra asked me what kind of music was popular when I was a kid. Not, like, what I listened to, but what was popular. I began a wonderful lecture on the weirdness of the 1990s — on how, for a short time, the idea of a ubiquitous top hit fell away and we were given a look into wonderful and awful splinters of taste. I talked about how there were really two kinds of rock music — the stuff that was good, and the stuff that was popular. On one side lie Pavement; on the other, Semisonic.

She pretended to listen. Then she showed me some weird meme video that she referred to as “the music I like.” So I gave her homework. For a second, I became that dad and I said, “Listen to this 90s alternative playlist and find stuff you like.”

I don’t care if she hates most of it. I just care that she finds something she likes. Some bright ray; something worth remembering.

So much of what we think we hate is due to pre-assuming the context, to figuring it out before we’ve even experienced it, to preclude ourselves from wasting our time or feeling left out or being disappointed. There’s a line where we start protecting ourselves from things. When we double check to see if something’s cool or relevant , when we hide behind taste as a personal gatekeeper, when we let go of free association. As a music fan, I feel like I’ve spent years catching up, digging myself out of the hole I dug deep into my punk world, frantically searching for what I missed. There’s so much out there that we can all find something exciting and weird and sometimes even completely normal where we don’t expect it.

She did her homework, kind of. Her list of five songs included Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” and R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People,” but it also included Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” and some stuff from a Britpop band called Shed Seven that I’d never heard of until yesterday. She rushed through it, completed it to make me happy, and went back to her YouTube meme videos, but I guess it’s a start.

It’s a start, for sure. Context is always context, taste is always taste. We’ll still listen to 101.9. We’ll all judge something before experiencing it. And, hopefully, we’ll learn to appreciate that which lies just outside our lane.

]]>http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2019/01/11/so-what-were-the-90s-like-dad/feed/0Bah Humbug, Now That’s Too Strong!http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/12/10/bah-humbug-now-thats-too-strong/
http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/12/10/bah-humbug-now-thats-too-strong/#respondMon, 10 Dec 2018 20:07:50 +0000http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/?p=2669In the time between last Christmas and last week, “Christmas Wrapping” by The Waitresses became my favorite holiday song, much to the chagrin of my daughter (who thinks it’s annoying) and my son (who doesn’t get it). There’s no real reason. I don’t particularly relate to the song, with its missed connections vibe and its accepted solitude, but it’s real. It feels timely. Because this year has been a long rambling narrative of dashed hopes interspersed with occasional bright horns.

The Happy Holidays from the Vilhauers playlist is probably mis-titled, in that it’s a playlist of holiday songs designed to balance the traditional with the weird — a balance I find myself teetering on in almost every part of life — rather than a specific call for happiness. As I reconcile my early metal and classic rock days with my formative punk and indie years, and as my kids find joy in traditional pop in the same songs I once derided, I find my tastes have gotten more accepting. There’s no shame in the music you like, unless maybe you’re six hours into an Imagine Dragons playlist that’s skewing your Spotify algorithm.

(ED NOTE: No, this month’s associated mixtape isn’t a holiday mixtape. It’s got two holiday songs, though. I leave the holiday playlists to Boon, as I should probably leave ALL mixtapes and playlists, to be perfectly honest.)

My holiday playlist is everything that everyone hates about playlists that try to be cool, as I am very very aware I try to do at every point in my life. It’s got that Prince one and something from Courtney Barnett and a bunch of the Sufjan Stevens songs, and it’s got some weird stuff (Bad Religion, the Kacey Musgraves song about how Willie Nelson gets high) and some re-imaginings (Los Straightjackets, Sharon Jones) and songs that have Christmas in the name but probably aren’t really about Christmas at all (Mogwai’s “Christmas Song”).

It’s got some classics, too. Because as cool as I try to be, I can’t help but put that Mariah Carey song on there. I can’t help but be happy when I hear “Last Christmas” — yes, the Wham one — or Darlene Love or any of the songs from the Home Alone soundtrack. As I’ve found in making mixtapes for this blog over the past year, the weird stuff doesn’t come across as interesting if it’s not juxtaposed with the songs they’re riffing on; the curation of something meaningful needs some footholds. Some familiarity, for when things need to snap back to reality.

It’s also got the sad ones. I like the sad holiday songs, like “Hard Candy Christmas” and “Lord We Sure Need Some Rainbows In December” and “2000 Miles” and parts of “Fairytale of New York.” For many, the holidays aren’t fun, nor are they exciting. They’re stressful and scary and full of dread, when people we’d like to forget are thrust back into our lives, or when money is stretched as we try to make things seem normal, or as simple seasonal changes take affect. It gets cold and it gets hard and no amount of Big Star is going to make that go away.

Even though the Vilhauers are healthy and happy and grateful for everything, I still feel like I feel like I was dragged this year. I feel like all angles were ambushed, like my anxieties had a field day, all as my kids’ anxieties surfaced and I struggled to help them. I feel exhausted going into the next year, and that’s without even talking about the world outside my own mind.

But then, when things feel weighted and constricting, there’s a weekend like a week ago, where the ice glazed and the snow fell and we walked in a blizzard to get egg nog and then played Pictionary until way past bedtime and it felt like everything was reset, as if — and pardon this attempt to shoehorn The Waitresses lyrics into this post — our minds went out to get cranberries and met a bit of peace in the checkout lane.

The holidays do that, if you let them.

I think that’s why I always get weirded out by the glossy side of holiday music. There’s a genuine sadness in the holidays. And there’s a frantic weirdness. An over-the-top celebration. There’s a lot of forced charity and showmanship and not as much peace as we’ve all been promised, but there’s also a lot more empathy.

Sometimes, there’s a break. Sometimes you get to reset for a bit. You get to reflect on the good and the bad and you can hope for better and you can work toward giving more love and making better choices and confronting your demons, and you can do that knowing that even in the dumbest times you can make it though a bit of shit.

You can make it through a bit of shit, and then you can hold out for the horn section.

]]>http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/12/10/bah-humbug-now-thats-too-strong/feed/0Design By Committee: A Podcast Appearance by Me, Corey Vilhauerhttp://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/11/27/design-by-committee/
http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/11/27/design-by-committee/#respondTue, 27 Nov 2018 17:15:16 +0000http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/?p=2666Secretly — and I know I’m not alone in this — I want to host a podcast.

This isn’t a new thing, not at all. I tried once. I really did, but faking a You Look Nice Today-style podcast is harder than it looks. And also mostly not funny, apparently.

Which brings us to right now: a few weeks back, I was lucky enough to be a guest on Design By Committee, hosted by Matt Grocki and Justin Davis, where I actually got to talk about work stuff and, dare I say, sound like I know what I’m talking about.

We talked about our shared industry history. We talked about the time I had pickle juice dumped on my back. And, we talked about writing for accessibility, breaking content into robot-readable chunks for content management systems, and a handful of other off-the-cuff content and UX topics.

All of the thanks go to Justin and Matt for inviting me. You can listen below, or subscribe here. I look forward to part two — even more than I look forward to finally biting the bullet and creating my own podcast, which will never happen so please stop asking.

A stutter of notes and a barely discernible beat, and everything was off. But Rufus knew. Rufus knew because it was his song and it was his show and he wanted it right, in the spirit of the moment. So he stopped everything and they talked a bit and launched back into it.

I was awestruck. No exaggeration: I was fascinated by his boldness. But, I wonder now, why is that something even worth being fascinated by? Isn’t that exactly what should happen? Isn’t that what you should do when something’s messed up? Stop everything, adjust the moment, fix the damned thing, and carry on.

How comfortable, I thought, it must be to see something going wrong and be bold enough to stop it.

2

The truth is … I’m tired.

It’s been a rough two years for those who give a shit about, you know. People. And now here we are, the night before election day, and some of us are anxious because good god what if it doesn’t get better. Some of us are straight up frightened.

What’s scarier to me, though, is that some of us aren’t. Some of us are cool with this. With our kids being murdered. Our places of worship brutalized. Our journalists killed and our rights taken away and our general sense of decency wiped clean and left sterilized.

It would sound like villainy if I hadn’t seen it on the news for two years.

So, here I am. Tired.

Tired of a lot of things, but mostly tired of the constant onslaught of horribleness, and of trying to keep a head above the flood, all while promising our kids that the world isn’t really like this — that there’s always a pile of absolute garbage, and that pile of absolute garbage is a part of life — but that the rest can really be beautiful, and it can be strong and it can be faithful to the ideals of peace and nature and empathy.

It’s just that the garbage is loud. And it’s in charge. Right now, at least.

We also try to show our kids that the world is full of … things. We all have things. Those things are anxieties, and they’re differences, and they’re quirks and they’re all worth fighting for. Sometimes they’re things we love, and we want them to be acknowledged. Sometimes they’re things we fear, and we want those fears to be empathized.

But we all have things, and those things make us different, and those differences are okay. I try to help them understand that we should treat each person as if their things are the most important things in the world, because, for some of them, they are.

My kids get it.

I wish more people did.

3

I’m tired. But it’s easy for me to be tired.

There are more out there who have earned some rest, much more than me. They’re out there, exhausted, walking door to door, putting everything into this midterm cycle, looking for answers and gathering the courage to stop the song. To try to get things back in line.

I keep going back to that Rufus Wainwright show, except this time it’s a different song — one I’ve had stuck in my head all week. A beautiful song called “Going to a Town.” A song that, when rolled out near the end of his first set, without acknowledgement, felt as if it separated the assumedly partisan audience into two camps: those white knuckling the chairs in stoic defiance, and those — myself included — who sighed a bit, understanding the sentiment.

“I’m going to a place that has already been disgraced,” he sang. “I’m gonna see some folks who have already been let down.”

“I’m so tired of you, America.”

I’m tired too, Rufus. I’m so tired. I’m tired of America; of this America, at least, where we can’t even figure out kindness anymore. The song — our song — is being played incorrectly, and it’s up to us to fix it. To readjust the tempo, to change the beat a bit, with a level of boldness that we often try to forget.

]]>http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/11/05/im-so-tired/feed/0Putting Things Backhttp://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/10/11/putting-things-back/
http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/10/11/putting-things-back/#respondThu, 11 Oct 2018 14:37:32 +0000http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/?p=2655Earlier today, Kerrie jokingly asked me to write 300–400 words on “The Gift of Time” for a magazine assignment, and so I typed a bunch of garbage and laughed at my funny jokes and then felt the shadow of doom slowly creep over me as I realize I hadn’t posted October’s playlist.

The past month has been hard for a lot of reasons. The news sucks every day, so there’s that. The transition from summer to fall has been nearly impossible for the Vilhauer household. For the past two months, we’ve managed to rearrange everything; new schools and new teachers, new friends, new anxieties and new floors. Everything has changed, and we’re pulled taut trying to keep it all in place while we wait wait wait to get the okay to move it all back, piece by piece, hoping that it all fits back together. (Unlike the trim in our living room, apparently.)

We’re learning more and more how things don’t always fit back together. Isaac’s best friend’s brother was in a horrible bike accident — his surgeons were convinced it was a car accident — and after a month at Children’s Minnesota they’re just getting back into town. After too many CT scans and too many surgeries, after a previous discharge turned into an emergency flight back, after siting and waiting and waiting forever, they’ve finally returned.

Now they get to try to start putting things back where they belong. What does that do to a kid? What happens to your sense of security when you spend your seventh birthday in the hospital?

Sometimes, things are thrown around enough that they seem impossible to restore. All you can do is hold on. Sometimes you watch as anxiety grips a gentle heart — a nine-year-old heart, who is aching for his friend and that friend’s brother — and squeezes it tight, unrelenting and cruel. Sometimes you try to turn to the outside world for solace, but instead you’re treated to people having a beer party to celebrate sexual assault — the kind of thing that makes you want to give up trying to understand how the very systems built to protect us are so broken at their deepest levels.

And sometimes, it’s just a bunch of things, all at once. Sometimes you just learn to live with the mess. For a bit. You fight to make it right, but you know it won’t change overnight. You allow a deadline to slip in the name of self care. You shake it off and wake up refreshed but maybe a little ashamed. You do half the job, admit defeat, and hope things will be better the next day.

I am aware that there’s a lot of privilege in being able to do that — to be able to gingerly step through the mess as life is rearranged around you, walking through the other side with your health and your freedom and your dignity still intact.

But shit can still feel hard, even when it’s small. And all of those small things add up, and even though we’re comfortable — we’re fortunate and lucky and we remind ourselves of these things all the time time — sometimes we just get … tired. Sometimes, time itself likes to fuck with us, and then everything feels hard, and nothing feels good and then you look out the window and the world seems to be burning around you.

And I guess that’s why I forgot to post my playlist until now. I guess.

]]>http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/10/11/putting-things-back/feed/0When Anyone Can Be Heard, Anyone Can Be Horriblehttp://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/09/10/when-anyone-can-be-heard-anyone-can-be-horrible/
http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/09/10/when-anyone-can-be-heard-anyone-can-be-horrible/#respondMon, 10 Sep 2018 18:44:00 +0000http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/?p=2649In the mid–90s, the music industry exploded. The rush to find the next Nirvana resulted in the weirdest decade of music on record as the underground was pushed to the top and the mainstream pushed to adapt. Technology had begun turning us away from radio, and the outlets we used to find music expanded. There was more room for us to learn. More room for us to explore.

Zuider Zee — a band from the 70s that no one remembered — could have been helped by this kind of explosion. While they had the backing of some of the world’s foremost musicians, they never really … hit. They put out one record, they disappeared into obscurity, and they’ve only now resurfaced with a repressing of an album that would be a critical darling if released today.

While the bands I grew up with in the 90s were obscure to my parents and teachers, they at least had an audience. They had an audience because we could find them. Zuider Zee was not that lucky.

Fast forward to now, and replace bands with people, and music with opinions, and now instead of just dropping a hit record, you’re dropping a hot take. Anyone can be heard; anyone can have a voice.

It’s how revolutions start, but we often forget (until we’re reminded) that revolutions can start on either side. When anyone can have a voice, that means anyone can have a voice, and that means the bad rolls in with the good. In music, you get label-free music from amazing bands, but you also get hateful (and horrible) neo-nazi thrash.

Two weeks ago I watched Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette, a Netflix comedy special that tears down the concept of a comedy special, and I was left speechless. I just sat and stared. After Rilo Kiley’s “A Better Son/Daughter” finally faded out. After Netflix suggested that maybe I move on with a few episodes of Queer Eye. After a week, and another. I looked at my place, my privilege, my awareness.

And I thought about how Gadsby dug deep into art history, about how the artists that we’d told all along were important and thoughtful, who have been placed on a pedestal, who were shaped by a collective of critique, free from the public discourse, their transgressions both accepted and brushed off. There were fewer channels; fewer artists that we could look to, and fewer works we could study, and fewer things we knew about the people behind the art.

These days, we are much more likely find out when people are horrible. Either because they’re outed as horrible, or because they out themselves as horrible. What would we have done if Picasso’s creepiness was made a part of his legacy? Would it have raised any outrage? Would it have encouraged copy cats?

Of course, there aren’t copy cats when it comes to horrible things. There are just people doing horrible things looking for absolution from the famous. Looking for justification. Emboldened, seeing a pastor claim he was being too friendly when he gropes Ariana Grande during the funeral of Aretha Franklin, as _another_ pastor, standing in a position of power, claimed that a black woman cannot raise a black boy to be a man at the funeral of one of the boldest single mothers we’ll ever know.

Sometimes history forgets a band or two. That’s forgivable. They’ll always come back up. They’ll always be found if they’re worth being found. And sometimes history will forget people who do horrible things, which would be wonderful because horrible things are hard to remember. But if we forget them, we forget the lesson, and we forget why they were horrible in the first place, and then we experience it all over again, the same band, the same song, one more time around as our options narrow once again.

]]>http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/09/10/when-anyone-can-be-heard-anyone-can-be-horrible/feed/0What I’ve Been Reading: Notes From a Small Islandhttp://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/09/07/what-ive-been-reading-notes-from-a-small-island/
http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/09/07/what-ive-been-reading-notes-from-a-small-island/#respondFri, 07 Sep 2018 18:00:53 +0000http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/?p=2646Notes From a Small Island and how I initially thought I was going to write the next great travel novel.]]>My path to writing lies along three distinct points.

It started with an essay writing course in college, where I discovered writing was a thing I could do.

It eventually gelled as Black Marks on Wood Pulp gained a bit of recognition and I saw the kind of audience I could reach.

In between the two, I needed some kind of drive. I needed something that made writing seem fun.

To say Notes From a Small Island was formative is an understatement: Bryson’s tale of his last grasp at English-ness before heading back to his native United States shaped everything I thought writing could be, from how it’s written to the simple things I obsess over.

It was a blueprint for someone who had little confidence but a lot of drive, and it hit all the right notes when I found it after the dawn of the new century: it fueled my longing nostalgia for England, a country I had just visited and in which I had accidentally left a bit of my heart, and it was sarcastic and fast and effortlessly funny. It wasn’t a cool travel novel; there was no attempt at making things look easy, and there was no attempt at beauty or posing. It was a far cry from the adventure blogs and Instagram Airstream posts of today: it was an overweight dopey dude complaining about bad architecture. It was pure dad jokes and fumbling and honesty, and even as a 20-something I could relate.

More than anything, it made writing seem accessible. As if there was a small place in which I could fit in.

I’ve always had a daydream that I would re-write the book — that I’d track his path through England and re-walk it, seeing what’s changed in the past 20 years. I just re-read Notes From a Small Island this summer — a familiar read for a summer of bike tenting and mountain travel — and imagined myself walking the same paths, commenting about the same buildings, bringing new perspective to a story that’s already been told.

To be honest, that’s not far off of what I thought I’d be doing when I started writing. I’ve even got an embarrassing few thousand words about New Orleans that could be classified as travel writing. But it never really stuck. That wasn’t my deal. I moved on, changed scope, found a voice, and never looked back on travel writing; in fact, the entire genre shifted and moved and I fell out of love.

And that’s the point, maybe. I mis-aimed on Notes From a Small Island as an inspiration. My goals a dozen years ago was focused on topic and structure — I will write a travel novel! I will write about England! I will complain about tea! — when in fact it was the style and angle that I identified with and folded into my own. The idea that writing shouldn’t be intimidating (even when it is); that writing about anything can still be something worthwhile.

For me, some of the infallible luster has worn off of Notes From a Small Island. I was once a fresh-faced early traveller, while now the idea of travel feels more weighty and involved, with work trips and long drives no longer as adventurous as they used to be. I may still long for exotic locations, but I long much less than I used to.

Even with that, though, reading Notes From a Small Island pulled some of that nostalgia back, and it was interesting too see where this whole thing started; to look on it with fresh eyes, to understand the genesis of this blog, this career, this entire thing.

To know that, chances are, I’m not going to write the next great travel novel. But also to know that it wasn’t all for naught. To know that can’t go back again, but it’s sometimes nice to try.

]]>http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/09/07/what-ive-been-reading-notes-from-a-small-island/feed/0Writing: A Process for Untying Knotshttp://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/09/05/writing-a-process-for-untying-knots/
http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/09/05/writing-a-process-for-untying-knots/#respondWed, 05 Sep 2018 18:47:15 +0000http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/?p=2642For my nine-year-old, the transition into the new school year has been difficult.

There’s a lot of change. His sister has moved to middle school, making this his first school year without her, and two of his favorite teachers from past years have also moved on. He’s in a new grade with a new class model. He’s spent the summer playing with his closest friend, but now that friend goes to a different school.

The types of relationships that he depends on — relationships that help him find level ground and recalibrate when frustrated — are either missing or truncated. He looks around and feels lost. But the bigger struggle is understanding what specific part of this change upsets him, because he — like any nine-year-old boy undergoing a ton of change all at once — struggles to name his feelings.

So we often wonder if a sudden outburst of anger is due to a current situation — a frustration with Roblox or a decision we’ve made for dinner — or if it’s something that’s built up over the day, milling through his head, eating at his patience, poking at his brain until he’s just too tired and tapped out to control his emotions.

We don’t know. And, to be honest, he doesn’t know. Not at that moment. Not yet.

A Forgotten Post

A few weeks ago I published a blog post about one of my favorite places in the world and how it’s slowly changing into something I don’t recognize. I wrote it over months, revisiting it, tweaking it, making sure it was capturing every angle. The topic had become very complicated, at least in my head.

I wanted to do it justice. I wanted to sound intelligent, but also emotional. I wanted to talk about both sides.

But even with that level of preparation, I hid my head. I posted it and then braced myself. I wasn’t sure where it was going to land. If it was going to land.

It didn’t. The post itself didn’t get much of a response, even after “ICYMI”ing it on the following Monday. So I resigned myself to what felt like failure. That the topic wasn’t important, or that it wasn’t as inspired as I thought it was. That it fell flat. That was that.

For a few days, I felt bad about it. And despite Kerrie telling me that I shouldn’t build my worth around how much people liked something I wrote, I still felt bad about it.

For real. I still do, a little.

A Forgotten Lesson

Then, a few days ago, I was reminded of a retreat I had attended in 2013.

It was a content strategy retreat, for independent and independently positioned content strategists, where we shared ideas and compared notes and pushed each other to open up and collaborate. To further our understanding of the industry a little bit, and also to get a bit of context around our own practices.

And while it was great to immerse myself in the industry with some of the smartest people I know, it was also formative in how it positioned the act of writing itself. In answering a question about writing industry-specific blog posts, I offhandedly commented that writing to me is less focused on the final product and more focused on the process of organizing my own thoughts.

That the thing you read on this blog or in a book or in a work document isn’t really the work. It’s just the documentation of that work.

I don’t actually write to be read. I write to better understand myself. Writing, from the dawn of Black Marks on Wood Pulp, to my almost obsessive focus on documenting and publishing methodology, is a trusted method toward personal comprehension, where I can begin to organize and make sense of concepts that otherwise roll around in my head like so many metaphorical boulders.

So when I have those down moments — when I begin to wallow in the uncertainty of whether or not a blog post is successful or not — I forget the reason I started writing it in the first place.

I was focused on trying to sound intelligent but also emotional. I was focused on talking about both sides. But that wasn’t really the point, was it?

Nah. The point was that I needed to write myself into an understanding. I needed to know why I was emotional. I needed to know which side I landed on.

I needed to figure out, somehow, why my gut twisted when I read about that specific instance of gentrification (but not about other forms of it) and why I was so fired up about this mountain (but not about other mountains) and why this specific section of my own personal nostalgia was grabbing a much larger percentage of my processing power.

I needed to write my way out of whatever it was I was feeling. Publishing it was always secondary.

Some Forgotten Knots

It turns out, after a few attempts at getting people to notice my post, I forgot about it altogether.

I forgot about its “performance,” which is good because that way lies selfish introspection and misaligned assignment of self-worth. But I also forgot about the topic itself. As if throwing that post online had lifted it completely off of my mind.

I had worked through my struggle, and I had put a name on my feelings, and I had aired them out and now I was able to move on.

This is where we’re at with the nine-year-old. We try to help him. We try to help him understand that anger and fear are okay. That he’s safe. That he’s loved. But we can’t begin to know what’s happening until he says something out loud.

To take the story in his head and spill it out for us.

It’s slow going, but we’re making progress. And that’s all we can start with. Progress. Understanding the process, spelling out the problems, and piecing things together, one by one. The talking, the apologies, the understanding don’t matter as much as the process of owning those thoughts and frustrations and making them real.

We so often see writing as a communication method for documentation or entertainment or emotional manipulation. For other people. For the ones doing the reading. But there’s also a certain bliss in knowing how it affects those of us doing the writing, allowing us not just to remember things, but to untie the knots. To understand our own stumbling blocks, and to ease us for a bit.

To allow us to forget. In seeing the scope and organizing our thoughts, we can free up space. And with that, we are able to let those thoughts go. Until the next time we need them. Later on. If ever.

Thirty years ago, throughout September 1988, students around the world learned more about forest fires than any time before. As a central focus of their early-year ecology lessons, middle school and high school students studied the benefits of forest fires — why they matter, why they’re important, and (most importantly) why the balance they create, removing thousands of acres of life in exchange for fresh ground, was invaluable for the future of the forest.

Meanwhile, thousands of younger kids sent thank you letters to those who risked their lives to fight fires. Alongside drawings of awkwardly proportioned firefighters, many of the letters included drawings of trees. Pine trees, usually. Trees “to replace the ones lost in the fire.”

The fires in Yellowstone National Park were finally settling down. Rain and snow had dampened much of the fire by this point. The hastily assembled collection of fire personnel, U.S. military, and volunteers were allowed to slowly disband as firefighters focused on keeping the remaining fires at bay. The embers still glowed — only a November snow would finally put the matter to rest — but the devastation was final. The landscape — charred stumps jutting out of the ground like used matches, a slow settling of ash finally blowing clear — was gutted.

This was the new Yellowstone.

It was an exhale after a long summer of heat and flame. As the sky slowly returned to blue after months of grey and orange, the sun no longer balled up as a menacing bomb floating behind the smoke-filled sky, we all breathed a little easier.

I still have my grandfather’s headlamp from when he helped fight those fires. Despite the onslaught of fire and wind, there was never any doubt that as the fire raged, the people who lived close were going to rise up. When Yellowstone was attacked, the entire region was attacked — and with that, their homes, their livelihood, their history. The fire invaded, and the locals fought back.

2. (What You Need To Know)

Just a half-hour or so south of Yellowstone lies two valleys. Here’s what you need to know.

First, there’s Jackson Hole.

Jackson Hole is the valley on the east side of the Tetons, in Wyoming. It’s the one people say when they usually mean to say “Jackson.” Jackson Hole includes the bulk of Grand Teton National Park, the city of Jackson, the National Elk Refuge, and a million little tufts of sage brush.

Then, there’s Teton Valley.

Teton Valley is the valley on the west side of the Tetons, in Idaho. Despite having “Teton” in its name, the Tetons aren’t as noticeable on this side, blocked by the gradual slope of Targhee National Forest. This is the quiet side of the mountains. More open. Sparsely populated.

In between the two, hinging the valleys together like a pair of wings, is the highway between Victor and Jackson: the Teton Pass. You pass through a town called Wilson as you roll into Jackson Hole.

Jackson and Jackson Hole were named after Davey Jackson, a trapper from the 1800s. Victor was named for a mail carrier named George Victor Sherwood. The Tetons were said to be named by French explorers because they thought the mountains looked like breasts, but in reality are probably named after the Teton Sioux tribe.

Wilson was named by Elijah “Uncle Nick” Wilson, who as a boy ran away to join the Shoshone tribe, became a Pony Express rider, and died a troubled western pioneer. He wrote an autobiography, and his family — his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren and great-great-great-grandchildren — have kept close a connection to the valley ever since.

I’m one of those great-great-great grandchildren.

That’s what you need to know.

3. (My Jackson vs. Kanye’s Jackson)

I wonder if there was a bit of culture shock. I wonder if the real yokel pockets of Teton County shone true, where things happen when they happen and most of the roofs are unfinished. Where the lawns are largely brown and the sidewalks are mostly approximations, graveled over and askew as they follow the path of the quickly disappearing grass line.

Or, I wonder if it was the kind of culture shock that can ruin a small mountain town. The kind of culture shock that’s been happening for decades, as a balance of bad cell signals and quaint western spaces pulls in wealthy vacationers, who become wealthy second-home owners, who become wealthy residents, who threaten the edges of the community as they descend and begin rounding off the rough corners of a formerly rough town. As they invite their friends and business partners on ski weekends. As they try to bring things up to their level.

I ask this as if it is West’s fault — as if he really played any part of this when he decided to essentially blindfold and trick the music media complex into a rustic Jackson Hole chuckwagon — but it’s not. On the contrary; I wonder if, in fact, West’s newfound dalliance with the Tetons is a symptom of the ongoing movement, as Jackson and the surrounding area slowly moves away from the Jackson I always knew and toward something that feels remarkably un-Jackson.

In fact, for all we know, in that moment — when Kanye stepped off a plane for the first time and stepped foot on a rented ranch and looked over the landscape — he may have felt more at home than ever before.

The truth is, Kanye’s Jackson and my Jackson aren’t the same. You can see this when you hit Town Square — the place you remember from the viral live feed, with the elk antler horns and, during the summers, the old west shootouts. You can turn left and see this as you head east, down a hill and into a residential area. To your left is the hospital, and to the right is one of the wider roads in town — Redmond Street, a road that seemingly heads straight and up the mountain, like a graph of rising property costs, like a chart displaying the inequity of pay.

You can see this when you turn left on Kelly Ave. About halfway down the block, there used to be a log cabin. Small, no more than 500 square feet on the main level. Plumbing backed up because of tree roots, the floor slowly tilting and shifting under the weight of a collapsing lower class. It was my great grandmother’s log cabin — Uncle Nick Wilson’s granddaughter’s log cabin.

4. (Fires Can Be Fun)

There wasn’t a single Yellowstone fire.

Instead, the Yellowstone fires were a loose collective — fires sparked in 250 different spots, joining together and rushing the landscape all summer long. There was no single point of entry: they came from all over.

“Fires can be fun,” Jack de Goliam, Park Ranger at Yellowstone said in a recap of the Yellowstone fire. “They’re a break from the routine, everyone gets swept up in the emergency effort, and lots of strangers arrive to help.”

The rush of attention. The influx of priority. It’s always an absolute thrill, both good and bad, when the floodgates — sorry: the firelines — are broken free and all hands are ready to tackle the problem. Even when we feel like we’re drowning in work — missed deadlines, sinking ships, roaring fires — we still, as humans, embrace the excitement and dig in.

“But, unlike other project fires I’ve been to,” Goliam continued, “The one at Yellowstone never ended.”

Because this time, it wasn’t just a small thing. This time, it started from everywhere. It felt like it never ended.

It did end, though. When all hope was nearly extinguished, the fire itself was gone — leaving nothing but burnt ground and new growth. Which is to say the fire never left. It just changed shape; its fuel transferring from a hot heat to the ground itself, restructuring itself as new and moving forward as if this is the way it’s always been.

As if the fire was the solution; as if the peace and comfort was the fuel.

5. (On Making It My Valley)

I spent every summer in Jackson, Wyoming, as a kid, which is funny because mostly I just hung out inside and played Super Nintendo and made live Rush mixtapes. I am not a skier, nor am I an avid fisherman or wildlife artist. I’m just a kid who has family in the valley. I’m just someone who loves the mountains and loves the space.

Which also makes me an insufferable wreck when it comes to staking my claim to the valley. I, like my mother before me, will proudly and often annoyingly point my finger in the air, triumphantly acknowledging my history, my connection, my lineage and right to be considered an honorary citizen of the two valleys.

In a lot of ways, this bravado has helped my real connection to the valleys. When you are tripping over yourself to tell stories of your childhood in Jackson, you tend to create a real, solid, love for the valley. You realize, much like we begin to see real expertise within our years of experience, that this is no longer an act. This is no longer a show, no longer a finger pointing celebration of proximity.

This is real love. Real affection. The valley overtakes you, even with its kind of dirty roads and its houses with no siding and its unmowed lawns and wild varmints, its very roughness providing a contrary expectation of peace and absolute chill. And so your memories of driving to the grocery store are puffed up into something more than they were before. Your memories of chopping wood — you hated it at the time, thought you might actually die in those woods — drop all negativity.

Every road, every corner, every rock and plume of brush and weird car with too many old license plates stuck in the back window — they’ve all joined together into one massive string, tied tight to the bottom of my heart, staked deep into the heart of Pearl Avenue. Yanked taut whenever I try to leave.

And that’s where things get complicated. Because while I keep thinking it’s my valley, it’s not.

I’m just a visitor. This really isn’t my fight.

6. (Gentrification And Our Fear of Change)

This isn’t a new or unique story, in the larger picture. Marginalized cultures and neighborhoods have been systematically uprooted and driven out for centuries, and this is a case of neither — this is a lament. This is a sadness.

There’s a bit of resentment in both valleys toward the influx of wealthy vacationers and second-homers, and that resentment sprouts from the western ethos of space and privacy. As a stranger, you are free to show up for dinner or a few weeks of vacation, but please keep moving.

And here we start dialing in on the idea of migration — both immigration and gentrification within the valley. Both tie largely to the discomfort that comes from new people showing up. Within the valley, immigration is always debated with an eye toward protecting the current state: protecting against job displacement and fighting to keep a traditional set of values and culture. It’s deeply personal, even if it’s not always fully realized — as new people, new cultures, and new experiences come into a new space, the things that we have always loved and cherished may … change.

Change is scary shit. And change is especially scary when it happens like this, when newness suddenly floods our everyday life, forcing us to adapt.

With gentrification, though, migration doesn’t lead to culture change as much as it leads to economic class change. Gentrification doesn’t mean looking for a new job and finding more Thai restaurants. It means a wholesale removal of the western ethos. It means pushing everyone out and adapting the valleys into pockets of upper-class taste, western and rugged and tied to nature, but in a BPA-free and sanitized container, where the treeline is removed to make wood accents inside the home.

Forgive me for being bold and reactionary, but to me — other than just pumping money into the area — there’s little that the new wave of vacationers and wealthy second-homers are adding to the culture of the valley. They are providing some viability for high-end specialty retail and art, but they are also pushing out any semblance of affordability. While other gentrified sections of major cities are still somewhat connected — they can still attempt to pull a workforce, or secure housing, from other areas of the town, the truth is Jackson is not connected.

These are heady thoughts to be having in a post about sad feelings, and as a relative outsider they are far to complicated for me to argue for. But they are at the heart of my struggle. While an influx of different cultures through immigration has the benefit of positively affecting the culture and diversity of an area, an influx of privilege classes through gentrification tends to barrel over existing culture through a mismatch of economic power. Prices go up. The temperature of the culture changes. And everyone’s too stubborn to do anything about it.

That sucks, because that culture means something to me. Regardless of whether you roll in for two weeks, regardless of how much you spend on your house, there’s a need to recognize the valley that’s being run over: real towns, with real culture, being pushed to the edge.

Real problems. For real people. And when the vacationers head back to their day jobs, those problems are still around. You still can’t afford the house you could ten years ago. You still can’t live in the valley your family helped settle. You still can’t. You just can’t.

7. (Evolutionarily Stronger)

A serotinous pine cone will not release its seeds until its resin melts, which takes a heat that goes far beyond a simple heat wave. Evolutionarily, this protects the seeds until they are given an optimal landscape: fresh, downed, soon-to-decompose plant matter mixed with a sudden lack of competition. This raises the chances of survival until, eventually, decades later, the patches fill in and the forest cover is made whole again.

In this way, fire is good. Fires are natural. They are required, in fact, and the brave people who live and work and embrace the dense forests and scraggled underbrush of Yellowstone know that, without fires, there is no renewal; that, like a slowly sinking company, there’s a need for change at the top of the pack, the producers that give us shade and protect us from harm eventually have to go. So new producers can live. So that the shade can be rebuilt and restructured.

Despite sadness and destruction at the micro level, we want fire. Looking higher, at the macro level, everything supports this. Get rid of the old. Bring in the new. Clear things out. Move on, evolutionarily stronger.

But with forests, and animal populations, and even other countries, the macro level is easier to comprehend. It’s all we know — our only connection is as a group, larger than the individuals who make it. It’s happening out in nature, which we still barely understand, from which we are still sort of separated.

On the micro level, though, it hurts. And so we fight it. The fire is good for the ecosystem, but tell that to a bird who’s lost her home. The doe who’s lost her fawn. The tree, each of them, one by one, falling in the name of a greater good that they’ll never understand.

8. (Forest for the Trees)

I’ve been drawn to the mountains since I first smelled them. I didn’t recognize the smell: I thought it was just the smell of a fresh spring day. The smell of hot concrete. The smell of a clean garage, one that smelled just like my grandparents’ garage always smells, one that, with a bit of gas and oil added, also smelled just like the small engine shop on Jackson Drive that my grandfather used to own.

I struggled with writing this post, because I couldn’t figure out my angle. How was I was going to address the weight on my mind without sounding entitled or blind to more serious cases of gentrification, and how I could possibly fake any level of authority. How I could possibly speak for the valley itself.

Kerrie saw it. She knew why this was important, even if my mind was scrambled.

“A piece of your heart is always there.”

I’m scared by how the valley’s changing, because my view of the valley isn’t macro. That’s not just a town I’ve visited a few times. That’s the city I grew up in every summer. Where my family planted trees and built houses from scratch and drove snowy passes before they had put the safety railings on. I’m scared for my grandmother and my aunt and my cousin and her little girl and I’m scared for people who struggle to make money in one of the most imbalanced economic situations in the nation.

I’m also scared because there’s always the chance that I, given a few additional tweaks, might be a part of the problem. The focus away from ranch life toward recreational land use. The ability for a high-end bike store to roll comfortably on the corner of a 1,000 population town, and for the grocery store to gouge us for local craft beer.

I’m scared because now, as an adult, as Jackson Hole becomes more of a tourist destination, Teton Valley is becoming exactly what I’ve always wanted, and I’m scared that by the time I’m ready to grab a hold I won’t be able to make it work. I’ll have been priced out, just like my family was priced out of Jackson over the past two decades.

Of course, that’s the issue right there.

I look at South Dakota towns like Hill City and Deadwood and I see high-end real estate mixed with tourism hokeyness and I shake my head as I wonder how it’s all made it this far, but I never think about the plight of those small towns. I never think about what it’s meant to the long-time residents, or what it says for the distribution of wealth or the identity of the population. Those aren’t my towns.
And while the two valleys aren’t mine either, I still feel protective. This is change that affects me, that I want to fight against, regardless of its outcome, because it’s different.

Because change is hard.

Because I’ve seen the individual trees, and I know that each of them is something special, and I don’t want a single one to go anywhere, regardless of how it will affect the overall health of the community. I can’t tell if I’m trying to save the forest, or if I’m just trying to save the trees along the side of the road. I can’t tell if I’m fighting gentrification, or if I’m just fighting change.

9. (Tree Scars)

Not every tree is downed during a forest fire. Some are saved; injured, but saved. They’re spared either because they sat in the right place, or because the wind shifted at the right time, or because they were too young, too wet, too hard to take down when there’s so much better fuel sitting around.

In that level of heat, even if saved, wounds form on the bark. The trees fight back by creating a boundary around the injury, protecting the open and raw area. A fire scar appears: a gnarly gash, breaking the bark’s pattern. Sometimes the scars fade into the tree itself, visible only in the rings and as a lump along the outside; sometimes, they’re visible forever.

The scars heal, and the trees survive. As they grow, the new forest growth fills in around them, pulling them back into the fabric of the canopy, each tree no more than a bit of anomaly.

Those scars are always there. The trees live with those memories, their scars fulfilling their role as a reminder, helping make the forest a richer place, living proof of change’s inability to take down every tradition.

Everything levels out, and the system ties itself together again, and the forest is back to where it was.

For now. Until another attack. Another shift in the ecosystem. Another change. Another fire, ready to lay things out again. To make things new again.

]]>http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/08/17/fire-change-and-the-valleys-i-know/feed/1Summer Hates Routines; Loves Fabricohhttp://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/08/06/summer-hates-routines-loves-fabricoh/
http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/2018/08/06/summer-hates-routines-loves-fabricoh/#respondMon, 06 Aug 2018 19:25:00 +0000http://www.coreyvilhauer.com/?p=2624I don’t know when I downloaded “Fabricoh” to my phone, but I do know that whenever I throw on the Bluetooth in my car, the song starts. The eighth song on the Archers of Loaf record I never listen to, “Fabricoh” isn’t a favorite. It’s not even one of the best songs on the album. It’s just the one I hear every time I get into the car.

The past month has been defined by things like that: letting things settle into a rhythm that we 1) don’t necessarily like or care about or 2) even really have the energy to change, all because outside forces are making it difficult to do so. In my car, the Bluetooth — how do you say this politely — eats turds. It takes forever to connect, and usually goes directly to iTunes, an app I never use. But to fix this, I’d need to:

Remove all songs from iTunes?

Remove iTunes itself, maybe?

Buy a new car, burn the old one, burn my Archers of Loaf records, and hide in a bunker.

I think we always expected to roll into summer free from routine, but in doing so we fell into new routines. Routines of inconvenience, really: we end up at nightly swimming lessons that cause us to rush dinner, and we travel nearly every weekend so laundry becomes a frantic scramble, and we see bad habits turn into toothpick structures, bowing under our weight as they give the false impression of stability.

It’s been hard to break those routines. Maybe I’m faking positivity when I say that I think we’re finally getting there — we have a cat now, which is weirdly more stabilizing than I expected it would be — but I actually think we’re finally getting there. I think there’s an edge to things; there’s an understanding that, while summer punishes our expectations, we’re still going to cobble together a normal routine. As always, we’ll figure it out just in time for school to start again. Just in time to re-learn how to go to bed on time.

I didn’t bother with subtlety in the playlist this month. I go to Idaho and struggle over a blog post for two months: The B–52’s “Private Idaho” and Amie Mann’s “Drive.” I peek at the news through my hands: The Dispoable Heroes of Hiphoprisy’s “INS Greencards A–19 191 500.” I have a pile of things to push through: Lyrics Born’s “Do That There.”

I have a playlist to make. I have to make it interesting and fun and stuff, so I push for altered states (“Dramamine,” “Wasted,” “Booze,” none of which were chosen on purpose, just that sometimes the songs we listen to betray our emotions) and try to stay positive (“I’m One Hell of a Dude”).

And “Fabricoh,” too. Because if I’m not going to bother figuring out my damned Bluetooth, I might as well own it.